Yahoo Q2 Post Slight Decline, Yang To “Put Back On Winning Path”

Despite posting a slight decline from last year’s numbers in their Q2 report yesterday, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang intends to put the company back on “a winning path”. A company blog detailed Yang’s intentions for Yahoo in the coming quarters. (The content of the entry is shown below).

Yahoo shares lost 3.8% in after hours trading yesterday to trade at $26.49. The company’s second-quarter net income was $160.57 million, or 11 cents a share, compared with $164.33 million, or 11 cents a share, last year.

Total revenue was $1.7 billion compared to $1.58 billion same quarter last year. “Net sales, which exclude payments Yahoo makes to other Web sites to acquire traffic rose to $1.24 billion from $1.12 billion a year ago” MarketWatch reported.

This is the first financial report since the resignation of CEO Terry Semel last month and co-founder Jerry Yang took ovcer as his replacement.

Yang’s blog comments:

Based on the hundreds of people — employees, investors, partners, advertisers, users, peers — who’ve reached out to me over the past month, there seems to be no shortage of folks who want Yahoo! to succeed. Put me at the top of that list.

The last four weeks have been occupied by candid conversations and an intense analysis of our assets, challenges, lessons learned, and opportunities. It’s helped me look at Yahoo! through new eyes — an approach I think is critical for a guy who’s been around for 12 years. While our business continues to grow, we need to dramatically improve our performance and I intend to put us back on a winning path.

So, how do we get there? To be honest, we don’t have all the answers today — there’s a lot of work to do and some tough decisions ahead. I have a great sense of urgency to move in a fast yet focused way, but we want to do this once and do it thoroughly so it will take time. I intend to spend the next 100 days mapping out a game plan and working with Sue, Filo, Blake, and the team to put the right organization in place and make any necessary changes. We need to invest in areas that are most critical to our success and de-emphasize those that are underperforming or match up with our priorities. There will be no sacred cows.

I believe that Yahoo! is too often defined by the competitive landscape, rather than by what we can accomplish with our assets. I’m determined for us to define our own path. Here’s where it starts: We see Yahoo! as a deep and active marketplace — an ecosystem of hundreds of millions of consumers, advertisers, publishers, and developers. All benefit from the presence of the other, and the healthier the ecosystem is, the healthier Yahoo! is. That ecosystem today is not thriving as it should and there’s a wide gap between where we are and where we need to be.

We want to deliver the most insights, serve the best content, and create the greatest value. To achieve that, we plan to take advantage of three major differentiators — consumer insights, a prime asset we’ve frankly under-leveraged to date; openness, as demonstrated by the online exchange we’re building with Right Media; and being the partner of choice, as we focus on creating relationships like those with Ebay and the newspaper consortium.

There’s a lot of heavy lifting ahead, but I’m feeling good about our awesome assets, our initial progress against our challenges, and our vast opportunities if we nail down and execute against the right plan. It’s imperative that we accelerate the transformation of Yahoo!. Our immediate priorities are to invest in the right businesses and shift our product focus accordingly, speed our decision-making and execution, channel our technology assets to build game-changing platforms, and do a better job of attracting, developing and motivating talent while rekindling the culture of winning that built this great company.

One last note: Don’t be surprised if you don’t see a lot of me in the press in the near future as we keep our heads down working through the challenges and opportunities at hand. I’m sure not everyone will agree with that approach, but it feels right to me. I’m a big believer in doing versus talking. We’re focused on making changes from the inside out and we’ll get out there when the time is right.

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.